Thinking Clearly #95-Critical Thinking and the Nature of Human Consciousness-with guest Anil Seth
Jun 25, 2024
Professor Anil Seth discusses the nature of human consciousness, the brain as a prediction machine, controlled hallucination, belief formation, and the intersection of critical thinking, consciousness, and artificial intelligence in a thought-provoking exploration of the mind on Thinking Clearly podcast.
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Consciousness As Subjective Experience
- Consciousness is any subjective experience that disappears under general anesthesia and returns when you recover.
- Thomas Nagel's idea: for a conscious organism, 'there is something it is like' to be that organism.
From Hard Problem To Real Progress
- The 'hard problem' asks why physical processes give rise to subjective experience and seems deeply puzzling conceptually.
- Seth prefers a 'real problem' approach: break consciousness into tractable aspects and explain them incrementally.
Brain As A Prediction Machine
- Predictive processing casts the brain as a Bayesian inference machine making top-down predictions about causes of sensory signals.
- Perception is a 'controlled hallucination' where predictions are shaped and calibrated by sensory input.